Using Ask TED to build or edit an automator

Opening Ask TED

Select the purple sparkle button near the bottom-right of any page, or press ⌘J (Ctrl+J on Windows), to open Ask TED — it's available everywhere in the app, not just inside the automator builder, and every team member can use it. It's not a general product chat, though: today it knows about your team's automators and automation setup, it can look up your team's deals — find a deal, read its details, expenses, offers, showings (naming the buyer or vendor on each), recent activity, every field on the deal page (property type, lead source, title status and so on), who is on the deal (the title company and its point of contact, the lender, the agents, the JV partner, who sent the deal in, the entity it's held under, the market, and every vendor on its Vendors list), and (for admins) its financial summary — and it knows your team's contacts and companies too, including their buy boxes and lending boxes, and can find matching buyers or lenders for a deal (see Finding buyers and lenders below). It can also answer business questions — revenue, agent performance, pipeline health, stalled deals, tasks and deadlines due, closed-deal history (see Checking your business figures below) — and make changes to a deal, a contact, or a contact's/company's buy box or lending box, for you — see Making changes to a deal, Adding and updating contacts and Updating a buy box or lending box below. For questions about using TED SYSOPS generally, use Ask a question in the "?" help menu instead.

On a deal you can also ask about:

• The buyer contract — "Is the buyer under contract?", "When is the buyer's DD up?" It answers with the contract status, buyer, amount, earnest money, key dates and any contingencies.
• Open tasks — "What's open on this deal?" lists every open automator task on it, whoever it's assigned to.
• Documents — "Is the signed contract uploaded?" It checks the Documents tab by kind and file name. It can't open the files.
• The checklist — "What's left on the checklist?"
• Liens and title issues — "What liens are on it?" lists each one with its amount, and the open and cleared totals.
• Buyer blasts — "Did we blast this to buyers?" shows each campaign's status and how many it went to, opened and clicked. You need Contacts access to see campaigns.
• Emails — "What did title email us?" lists the emails linked to the deal by subject, sender and date. It can't read what an email says.

Inside the automator builder itself, there's a second Ask TED button in the toolbar — it opens the exact same panel, already aware of the automator or draft you have open, so a request like "add a step for X" applies to that one without you having to name it.

Suggested actions

On a few pages, opening a brand-new conversation shows a row of suggested prompts as buttons under the empty-chat message — on a deal page: "Summarize this deal," "Log an expense," and "What's blocking this deal?"; on the dashboard: "What needs my attention today?"; on the Contacts page: "Find contacts I haven't touched in 30 days." Select one and it sends immediately as your first message — no need to type it yourself. They only appear before you've sent anything in that conversation.

Asking it to build or edit

Type what you want in the composer (for example, "add a task for the listing agent after the title is opened") and select send — the composer grows as you type a longer prompt, up to a few lines, then scrolls. For anything substantial, it proposes a plan first — a title and a numbered list of the steps it intends to add or change — with two buttons: Build this applies the plan to your draft, and Adjust lets you type feedback instead of accepting it as-is. For smaller edits it may just make the change directly.

You don't need to be a team admin to build with Ask TED — anyone whose role has Automators set to edit can, within the same lanes they can edit by hand in the builder. If your role only covers your own lanes, Ask TED can't change an automator or draft in another lane. It never publishes: it can send a finished draft for review, and a person publishes it from the builder. Writing a brand-new email template with Ask TED is still admin-only — if you're not an admin, it can pick one of your team's existing templates for an Email step instead. Without Automators edit access, Ask TED tells you so: "Building automators with Ask TED needs the Automators edit permission on your role. An admin can turn it on in Settings → Roles."

It knows about your team's own custom fields too, not just the standard deal fields — so you can ask it to branch on one ("skip the lender chase if Financing Type is Cash"), ask for one in a form step, or set one from an action, the same way you'd build it by hand.

When an automator sets, asks for, or branches on a deal field, Ask TED uses the same choices the deal page offers — Property Type is set to one of its ten options, Lead Source to one of your team's own lead sources, and a form question that asks for a dropdown field (like "what type of property is it?") becomes a dropdown of that field's choices that saves the answer to the deal. After it builds or changes a draft, it checks the draft against the field rules the builder uses, fixes what it can, and tells you in plain words about anything left — for example, a value that isn't one of a field's choices, a custom field that's been archived, or a field automators can't change — so you hear about it in the chat instead of discovering it when you open the builder. When you ask it to validate a draft, or to send it for review, it runs the builder's full check; if that still finds a blocking problem, it tells you what needs fixing instead of sending it.

While you have a draft open — whether you're already in the builder, or you started it from the panel elsewhere and kept chatting — Ask TED keeps building into that same draft, even after you navigate to a different page. It only starts a separate, brand-new automator when you clearly ask for one ("also build me a second automator for X"); it won't spin up a duplicate just because you asked for another change. If you open Ask TED from somewhere other than the automator builder and have no draft open yet — say, a deal page — just name which automator you mean; without one to anchor to, it starts a fresh conversation and may ask you to confirm.

If the draft it was building into is gone by the time you send your next message — most often because you left it completely empty for over a day and it was cleaned up automatically, or it was discarded from another tab — Ask TED tells you it's gone and asks whether to start a brand-new automator, rather than silently creating one for you. If another draft you have open is still there, it offers to keep building into that one instead.

After it makes a change, a summary card shows how many steps changed, with a Revert this change button if you want to undo just that turn. If your request instead has it start a different or brand-new draft, the panel shows a Created draft "<name>" notice with an Open button — select it to jump straight to that draft's own builder, no page refresh needed. If you have unsaved edits in the step list when a turn finishes, a notice tells you the latest AI changes weren't pulled in yet — save or discard your edits first, then reopen the automator to see them.

Making changes to a deal

Besides looking things up, you can ask Ask TED to change a deal for you — for example, "create a new wholesale deal at 123 Main St", "move 456 Oak Ave to Contract Executed", "log a $185,000 offer from Jane Buyer on the Oak Ave deal", "I showed 456 Oak Ave to Mike, he wants to make an offer", "add a note that the seller wants to close by the 15th", "set the property type to condo and the lead source to Referral on 123 Main St" (any of the deal's fields — property details, lead source and its detail, selling reason, purchase type, title status, disposition figures, the cancelled reason), or "set Financing Type to Cash on 456 Oak Ave" (any of your team's own custom fields on the deal).

Every change like this is staged as a plan first, never made instantly — Ask TED replies with a plan card describing exactly what it's about to do, and nothing actually happens on the deal until you select Apply. If it got something wrong, dismiss the plan and clarify instead. This is the same "nothing changes without your OK" behavior as an automator edit, just for live deal data instead of a draft.

A few things worth knowing:

• Changes it makes this way show up identically to typing them in yourself — the same deal fields, the same Comments/Expenses/Offers/Showings lists, and the same automators that trigger off a status or stage change still trigger the same way.
• When you tell it about a showing that already happened or an offer a buyer made, it records the buyer and the outcome/amount as real deal data (so it shows up in the right list) rather than just as a note.
• A field with a dropdown on the deal page — Property Type, Lead Source, Selling Reason, Title Status and the like — only takes one of that dropdown's choices (for Lead Source and Selling Reason, your team's own list). If you ask for something that isn't on the list ("set the property type to castle"), Ask TED tells you before any plan appears and lists the choices it does accept. Setting a lead source also fills in the lead source name the reports use, and changing it clears the old lead source detail — exactly like picking it on the deal page. A cancelled reason can only be set on a cancelled deal, and fields the deal page shows as read-only (like JV Type) can't be changed this way.
• Custom field changes go through the same checks the Deal Info tab applies — a dropdown or multi-select value has to be one of the configured options, and a field that's currently hidden on that deal (by a show-when rule, or because it doesn't apply to that deal type) can't be set until it would actually be visible there. If something doesn't qualify, Ask TED tells you exactly why instead of guessing.
• You don't need to be a team admin — anyone with edit access to deals (the same access level the Whiteboard/deal pages already require) can have Ask TED stage a change and select Apply. It only works on deals you have that access to, and it can never stage anything you couldn't do yourself on the deal page.
• Moving a deal to a different status, or marking a stage complete or skipped, currently needs a team admin.
• If you're a team admin, you can also ask it to create a new custom field — for example, "add a Financing Type dropdown with Cash and Hard money". It shows the new field as a plan first; once you select Apply, the field appears in the Deal Info tab's Custom Fields section for every deal, and you can then ask it to fill the field in on a deal. To rename, reorder or archive a field, use Settings → Deal Page Layout.

Finding buyers and lenders

Ask it something like "who should I call for 412 Oak?" or "find a lender for this deal who's newbie-friendly" and it looks up matching buy boxes or lending boxes and ranks them for you — the match score and the reasons ("zip 75201", "cash buyer", "price in range") always come from TED itself, never from Ask TED's own guess, so the ranking is the same one you'd see searching by hand. It'll also tell you how long ago each match was last verified, so you know how current the numbers are. You can ask more broadly too — "find cash buyers in the 75201 area" — without naming a specific deal.

Checking your business figures

Ask questions like "how's closing revenue this month?", "who's my best dispo agent by close rate?", "what's stuck in the pipeline?", "what's due this week?", or "show me deals that closed last quarter" — Ask TED answers these as real numbers straight from your team's data, in your team's own timezone, never a guess or an estimate. It always names the exact period it's reporting on (like "Aug 2026") and explains what a figure means when it could be read more than one way (revenue vs. profit, for example) — and it never adds up or averages numbers on its own; if you ask for a total it doesn't already have a way to compute, it says so instead of doing the math itself. When you ask it to rank people — "who closed the most deals this month?" — the order comes straight from the database, never Ask TED's own re-sorting.

Admins can also ask "what's our projected profit on active deals?" Ask TED answers with your team's projected Net Deal Profit across your active deals — each deal's sale price (the actual price if you've recorded one, otherwise the updated projected sales price, otherwise the original) minus contract price, JV fees, and expenses, before commissions. It also tells you how many deals the number covers, for example "3 of 5 active deals counted; 1 has no projected sales price and 1 has no contract price" — add the missing price to a deal and it joins the total. This is the same Net Deal Profit each deal's Financial tab shows, added up.

Ask how a flip is doing — "How's 123 Elm St doing?", "What did the Oak Ave flip make?" — and Ask TED reads the project's P&L (the same figures as the project's P&L tab): its Net Deal Profit, saying whether that's the actual figure or the current projection, plus the costs by bucket, days held, daily burn, how it compares to the approved plan and whether the net proceeds matched the wire. It never answers from the Fix & Flip deal or the Retail Resale alone, since either one on its own tells the wrong story. You need Transactions access, the same as the P&L tab; commissions and Net Company Profit only show if your role can see them.

It can differ from the Pipeline Value on your dashboard. Pipeline Value is also projected Net Deal Profit on active deals, but it always uses the projected sales price — even after you record an actual sale price — and a deal with no projected sales price adds $0 to it instead of being left out.

Money figures (revenue, profit, commissions, and agent performance) are admin-only, the same as everywhere else in TED SYSOPS — if you're not an admin and ask a money question, Ask TED tells you it can't help with that rather than guessing from other data it can see. Pipeline health, your own stalled deals, your own tasks due, and your own upcoming deadlines are open to every team member.

Adding and updating contacts

Ask TED can keep your contacts up to date as you work — for example:

• "Add Jerry Smith as a buyer, 813-555-0100" — adds a new contact with that type and phone number. Add a company ("Jerry Smith from ABC Investments") and it links him to that company, or creates the company if your team doesn't have it yet.
• "Set Jerry's follow-up to next Friday" — changes his follow-up date. It can also change a contact's name, owner, buyer tier, preferred channel, how you met, notes, do-not-contact settings, and their types ("Jerry is also an investor").
• "Log my call with Jerry — he's buying in Lakeland" — adds the call to Jerry's timeline. A logged call or meeting counts as being in touch, so his Last contacted date updates. You can also log a note — a note is just for your records, so it doesn't change Last contacted. Say when it happened ("I called Jerry yesterday at 3") and the plan card shows that date and time.
• "Start New Buyer Verification on Jerry" — starts a contact automator on him.
• "Who haven't I talked to in 30 days?" — lists the contacts you own that nobody has been in touch with in that time, with the ones you haven't talked to longest first, their last contacted date, and their next follow-up. Ask about "anyone" to see the whole team's, or narrow it to a type or buyer tier ("which buyers haven't we talked to in 60 days?").

Every change is staged as a plan first, and nothing happens until you select Apply. The plan card names the real contact and spells out each change — a follow-up date shows its weekday, like "Follow-up: Fri, Oct 23, 2026", so a wrong day is easy to catch.

A few things worth knowing:

• Before adding someone, Ask TED checks whether anyone on your team already has that phone number or email. If someone does, it doesn't create a second copy — it tells you who it is ("Looks like Jerry Smith already exists — update them instead?") and offers to update that contact instead. When the check comes back clear, the plan card says so.
• A type a contact still has deal history for can't be removed — for example, Buyer on someone who's on a buyer contract — the same rule as on the contact's profile. Ask TED tells you why before any plan appears.
• If a contact replied STOP to a text, Ask TED won't turn texting back on for them. They can text START, or you can turn off Do not text on their profile yourself.
• It can only start an automator that's built to run on a contact. Ask it to start a deal automator on a contact and it tells you "This automator runs on a deal" instead.
• You need edit access to Contacts, the same as making these changes on the Contacts page — you don't need to be a team admin. These changes can't be made from Slack; ask there and Ask TED points you back to TED. Asking who you haven't talked to works in Slack too.

Updating a buy box or lending box

If you tell Ask TED about a contact's or company's buying or lending criteria — "the Garcias now buy up to $250,000", "Acme Capital does deals up to $500k now" — it looks up their existing buy box or lending box first (so it only changes what you actually told it, not fields it's guessing at), then proposes the change as a plan, the same "nothing changes without your OK" behavior as a deal change. Select Apply to save it, or dismiss the plan and clarify if it got something wrong. This only works for contacts and companies you have edit access to on the Contacts page — you don't need to be a team admin.

Texts and calls

Once your team's phone system is connected, Ask TED can read the texts and calls logged on a contact or a deal — ask "what did the seller on 123 Main St last text us?" or "when did we last talk to Dana?". It answers from the same history you see on the Texts & Calls tab, including a call's AI summary when there is one. It never reads out call transcripts or recordings — open the tab for those.

Reading texts and calls works for everyone on the team. Team admins can also ask it to send a text — for example, "text the seller on 123 Main St that we're running 10 minutes late". Like any change, it's staged as a plan first: the plan card shows who it's going to, the number it'll go to (their primary number unless you named one), and the exact message in quotes. Nothing is sent until you select Apply. If the wording isn't right, dismiss the plan and tell Ask TED what to change.

• The text goes out from your own texting number, through the same send path as the Texts & Calls tab, and shows up there once it's sent.
• Ask TED won't propose a text to someone who opted out, a contact with no phone number, or a number that isn't on the contact.
• If a text can't go out when you apply the plan, Ask TED tells you why in plain words — for example, texting is off for your team, you haven't picked your texting number in your Profile, or the contact opted out.
• The text goes to exactly the number on the plan card. If that number is removed from the contact before you select Apply, nothing is sent — ask again to text one of their current numbers.
• If smrtPhone doesn't confirm the send, Ask TED tells you the text may have gone out. Check the Texts & Calls tab before sending it again, so you don't text them twice.

See Texts and calls on a deal or contact for the tab itself.

Writing an email step's content

If your build includes an Email step, you can ask Ask TED to write it in the same conversation — for example, "email the buyer confirming the earnest money deadline." First it checks your team's existing email templates for a close match by name; if it finds one, it tells you and offers to reuse or update that template instead of starting from scratch. Otherwise, it writes a subject and body using your team's merge fields (the same drafting it uses in Automator email templates's Draft with Ask TED), saves it as a new template, and links it to the step — so when you open the step, the template is already picked and the content is there to review, exactly as if you'd typed it yourself.

Each Email step gets one Ask TED template. If you ask for changes to an email it already wrote ("make it shorter," "add the bedrooms and bathrooms"), it rewrites that same template rather than saving a second copy, so your template list doesn't fill up with versions of one email. It never rewrites a template you picked or wrote yourself — if the step uses one of those, Ask TED saves its draft as a new template and switches the step to it, leaving yours as it was.

Because writing the email is its own separate piece of work on top of the conversation turn that asked for it, it uses 1 additional AI credit beyond the message's own cost — once per Email step per message, even if Ask TED rewrites that step's email more than once while answering. If your team is out of credits right when it tries to write the email, Ask TED says so in the chat instead of drafting; the rest of the conversation isn't affected.

Moving a how-do-I question to support

Ask TED knows your team's automators and deals — it isn't a general product help chat. If you ask it something like "how do I add a custom field?" or report that something seems broken, it doesn't guess an answer: it replies with a Moved to support card and starts a real support conversation with your question already in it. Select Open chat on the card to jump straight to that conversation in the help drawer, where TED's support assistant answers it — the same as if you'd opened Ask a question from the "?" help menu and typed it yourself. Nothing about the conversation you were having with Ask TED is lost; you can come back to it from the panel's conversation history at any time.

What it never does

Ask TED can draft and edit an automator's steps for you, but it never publishes one — publishing is always a decision you make yourself, from the toolbar's Publish button. See Publishing an automator.

Deep reasoning

For a brand-new conversation only, a Deep reasoning toggle appears next to the composer — turning it on asks Ask TED to think more carefully before responding, useful for a large, multi-step build. If your first message sounds like a full build, the panel suggests turning it on. Once a conversation has started, the toggle disappears — deep reasoning is set once per conversation, not per message. Deep reasoning is a Pro-plan feature; on a plan without it, the toggle is shown with a Pro badge and can't be turned on.

AI credits

Every plan includes a monthly allowance of AI credits, shown as a chip in the panel header. A standard message costs 1 credit; a Deep reasoning message costs 4, since it does much more work per reply. If a message fails outright with no reply at all, its credit is refunded automatically — you're never charged for a response you didn't get.

Once your team's balance drops to 20% or less of this month's included credits, a banner appears in the panel — "You have N AI credits left this month — packs are $19/100" — so nobody learns their balance by hitting zero. If your team runs out of credits for the month entirely, the panel stops sending and shows an Upgrade button — move to a plan with a bigger allowance, then send again. Your account owner also sees a one-click Buy 100 credits — $19 button right there in the panel — it charges the card already on file for your org and the credits are usable immediately, no page reload needed. If you're not the account owner, you'll see a note asking you to have them buy more instead. If your org doesn't have a payment method on file, buying takes you to a one-time secure checkout page instead of charging directly — the card you enter there is saved, so the next pack is one click. The same Buy 100 credits option is also on Settings > Billing, under its own AI credits & usage card, for whenever you want to top up outside the panel. Credits reset at the start of each billing month; a purchased pack's credits last 12 months and are used only after that month's included allowance runs out.

On a trial, the monthly allowance doesn't apply yet — instead your org gets a flat 20 AI credits, once, for the whole trial (the panel's chip reads "Trial: N" while this is active). Those 20 don't refresh month to month, but a credit pack purchase still works the same way and adds on top. Once your org converts to a paid subscription, the normal monthly allowance kicks in.

Conversation history

Select the history icon to see all of your past conversations across the whole team — not just this automator — each labeled with what it's about. New chat starts a fresh one. Picking an existing conversation that's about a DIFFERENT automator or draft than the one you're currently viewing takes you to that automator's own builder page and resumes it there; picking one about the automator you're already on (or a general conversation with no automator attached) continues right where you left off, in place. Ask TED also keeps your conversation open as you navigate between pages — starting a chat on one page and then browsing elsewhere doesn't lose it.